Tag: mospi

Is The Indian Economy Slowing Down?

That is a bit of a misleading title, because the focus of this blogpost isn’t about answering the question. It is, rather, about how to go about answering this question.

If you are a student new to economics, and someone were to ask you the question that is the title of this blogpost, how would you go about answering this question?

  1. Note that GDP data comes with a lag of about two months. You really should be looking at more recent data. But that being said, a good place to begin will be by tracking India’s quarterly GDP growth for the past (say) twelve quarters or so. This is actually bad advice for this specific time period, because of the pandemic, but under usual circumstances, not a bad place to start.
  2. Take a look at electricity generation numbers for the country. Check if there has been an increase, and if so, by how much.
  3. Check the trends in GST collections.
  4. Check trends in freight movement.
  5. Take a look at the Index of Industrial Production data.
  6. Take a look at India’s foreign trade data. Note that I have not used the word trend for these two points. That’s not because trends aren’t important (they are!) but because I want to lament the fact that India – the country that makes software for literally the entire world – isn’t able to come up with better ways to represent its own government’s data. Why does this not improve?!
  7. Take a look at the “Quarterly Financials of Listed Companies” on the CMIE website. Take a look at the trends for Net Profits and the PAT margins. This is usually on the right hand side of the website, you’ll have to scroll down a bit.
  8. Use the same website to take a look at the employment data.
  9. Take a look at the inflation data.
  10. Take a look at the bank credit data.
  11. Finally, note that this list is by no means complete. Other economists might well have more indicators they would like to recommend, and please don’t hesitate to show this list to them, and ask what they might like to include.
  12. Then, and only then, should you start to read opinion pieces about how well/badly the Indian economy is doing. See if your assessment matches with what is written or being said by others. If it doesn’t, ask yourself why. Check if you should look at other data sources, or other opinion pieces.
  13. But as an economist, remember: data comes first.

How To Look for Inflation

Here are links to the official sources:

The RBI’s DBIE website.

The latest CPI report on the MOSPI website.

The WPI PDF report from the EA Industry website.

If you want a secondary source with better graphs, Trading Economics is a good option.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is how you might think about inflation.

Greg Ip, the chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, speaks about how he came to deeply understand the topic of inflation when his mother told him that his pocket money would be linked to the consumer price index in Canada, which is where he grew up.

It’s one thing to ask students in a class to visit a website that provides information about inflation, and it is quite another to have a young person’s pocket money be linked to it. Guess who is more likely to follow the website keenly, and guess who is likely to ask questions along the lines of “But why should the prices of zarda, kimam and surti impact my pocket money, huh?”

(Item code 2.1.01.3.1.07.0 and these together carry a weightage of 0.04869% in our CPI. Link here, and while you are at it, look up 6.1.04.1.1.03.0, and 6.1.04.2.2.01.0, and ask yourself some very interesting questions. There’s lots more to ponder about in that PDF, these are just to get you started!)

But there’s other things to ponder about where inflation is concerned too:

If it really wanted to get ahead of the inflation challenge, India’s central bank should have paid more attention to Surf Excel.
The price of the laundry detergent went up by 20% in January. While that’s hardly news when most everyday things are becoming dearer everywhere, the interesting part was the retail price before the change: Rs 10 (13 US cents) for a bar.
Such tiny bars of detergent are targeted at less affluent consumers who are often unable to spend a rupee more without having to cut back on something else. To prevent these customers from downgrading to cheaper products, Unilever Plc’s India franchise relies on “magic price points” — such as Rs 5 or Rs 10 — that help buyers stay within their tight budgets.

https://theprint.in/opinion/magic-prices-did-warn-of-indias-sticky-inflation-but-rbi-didnt-notice/957873/

Read the rest of the article, and if you are unfamiliar with pricing, especially in an Indian context, this will help you learn about the nuances of inflation. You may or may not agree with the article’s conclusions about spotting inflation in India, and that’s fine, as far as we’re concerned. But what we should be learning is an important lesson:

Inflation is about more than just changing prices.

And finally, give a listen to this podcast – and if you can’t be bothered to listen to the whole thing, the really interesting bit starts at around the 24th minute or so, where Tyler Cowen and James Altucher help you understand how you might build your own inflation index. We got a puppy home recently, and I can attest to some of the points made in that section!

Read the news and make sure you keep an eye on inflation, sure. But learn – especially when it comes to a topic like inflation – that textbooks and newspaper articles are only a start. These topics are way more complicated than that.

The Indian FRED

So from yesterday’s post, this is where you need to go to get the data about India’s agricultural exports. There may be more than one correct answer, of course, but the Excel file that I generated came from here. The DGCIS website also offered to give me the data, but after telling me that I would need to pay the princely amount of Rs. 169 for it. Why Rs. 169? They charge Rs. 1 for each row of data in MS Excel. Nope, I’m not making this up.

A dummy query that I ran on http://ftddp.dgciskol.gov.in/

I can go on and on about the theme of working with data in India. Anybody who works with, or has worked with data published by the Indian government for the last twenty years can go on and on about this. We make it really difficult to access data easily in India, and that in the following ways:

  • It is not clear which site to access to get the data that you want
  • That data may not have been updated for a while
  • That data will probably only be available in PDF format (which is a whole separate level of hell)
  • The website may often be down (looking at you, dbie!)

To give you just one, already painfully familiar example: to download CPI data, should one go to the RBI website or the MOSPI website? If the MOSPI website (which is the correct answer), which MOSPI website? There have been two for a while now: this one, and this one.

And when you eventually do reach what may be the correct page, this is what you get:

http://164.100.34.62:8080/TimeSeries_2012.aspx

For the record, I know you can get CPI data from the old MOSPI website. But the point I am trying to make here is this: surely we can get (and surely we deserve) better data portals? For a country with the kind of software talent that India possesses, surely this is not the best way to design a UI?

I’ve written about this before here on EFE, but every time I write a post about data in India, I get frustrated enough to write about it all over again.

Appoint an educational institute to be the nodal agency, and get them to work on a report about what needs to change, and why and how, for the DBIE website to become better than it is right now. That doesn’t mean (at all) a blind copy of FRED, awesome though FRED definitely is.

https://econforeverybodyblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/16/playing-around-with-data/

Is there anybody in India working on trying to figure out ways to get Indian data to be more easily accessible? On documenting what data sources are needed, and how to arrange for their capture, their storage, and to make it easy to retrieve it? And this across all three levels of government((state level data is a whole different problem. And data below that level of government is, well, let’s leave it be for the moment))? And not for private profit, but so that data is open to all?

If there is such a project, I would be most grateful if you could point me towards it. And if there isn’t one, why are those of us in Indian academia not working towards figuring out how to get this done? This is India, and this is 2021. Surely we can do a better job of making data more accessible to ourselves?

Playing Around With Data

In yesterday’s post, I spoke about collection, and a teeny-tiny bit about the history of the institutions behind data collection exercises in India.((Really teeny-tiny bit. Please read the whole thing))

In today’s post, I’ll compare two websites – one American and one Indian – to show you how both countries allow researchers to use the data that has been collected. Spoiler alert: the American website does a way better job. The idea isn’t to run down the Indian website, but to see how much distance we need to cover in terms of improvement.

And I think it is a worthwhile question to ask – why is the American website so much better? What is it about us that we cannot come up with a website of a similar quality? Is it a question of capacity, of bureaucratic inertia, of not enough demand from the research community in India or something else altogether? This is a topic worth thinking about… but not today.

The American website is FRED, hosted by the St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve. FRED stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data, and it is a magnificent resource. It really and truly is.

Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is a database maintained by the Research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that has more than 765,000 economic time series from 96 sources. The data can be viewed in graphical and text form or downloaded for import to a database or spreadsheet, and viewed on mobile devices. They cover banking, business/fiscal, consumer price indexes, employment and population, exchange rates, gross domestic product, interest rates, monetary aggregates, producer price indexes, reserves and monetary base, U.S. trade and international transactions, and U.S. financial data. The time series are compiled by the Federal Reserve and many are collected from government agencies such as the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The economic data published on FRED are widely reported in the media and play a key role in financial markets. In a 2012 Business Insider article titled “The Most Amazing Economics Website in the World”, Joe Weisenthal quoted Paul Krugman as saying: “I think just about everyone doing short-order research — trying to make sense of economic issues in more or less real time — has become a FRED fanatic.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Economic_Data

I’ve been using the website for years now in classes that I teach, but I’m sure there are features of the website that I have not been able to use. It’s got the ability to create charts on the fly, it has embeddable widgets, it even has a functional Excel add-in.

If you’re looking at this website for the first time, try going through these exercises. Or, if you are a video kind of person, try this playlist on YouTube.

It is, all things considered, a wonderful way to take a look at data – mostly American, naturally, but it does have a whole host of other data series as well.

The Indian website is our comparable offering: the database on the Indian economy. As you will see once you click on the link, it isn’t nearly as user-friendly as FRED, and in my experience, the website itself isn’t always “up” all the time. There isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, a YouTube channel that explains how to use the website, and while there is a brochure about DBIE, it isn’t quite as helpful as it ought to be.

Indian researchers will also visit the MOSPI website often. That is the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. If you read the link supplied in the first footnote of today’s blogpost, you will know that MOSPI is the culmination of India’s data collection exercises – these have been ongoing since at least 1881.

The MOSPI website itself is a bit problematic, because there are two now. One is mospi.nic.in, which is the one I have linked to above, and the other is mospi.gov.in. This one seems to not be fully functional just yet, and the data is far from complete. Gratifyingly, what little data there is on the new website is made available in Excel formats.

That is actually a major problem, because on the old (but current, if you see what I mean) MOSPI, data is given in PDF format. There is an army of Indian researchers who have fought the Great PDF Wars, as a consequence, and therefore have learnt about Chrome extensions, and about Tabula. If you are planning on researching the Indian economy, you will have to acquire these skills sooner or later, for MOSPI and DBIE are the best we have on offer in terms of data portals((that are free and government run. There are other data portals available, but of course one must pay for them)).

I said I won’t speak about the “why” regarding data portal quality, but I would like to offer a suggestion about the “how” in terms of improving it.

Appoint an educational institute to be the nodal agency((IGIDR would be a good pick for obvious reasons)), and get them to work on a report about what needs to change, and why and how, for the DBIE website to become better than it is right now. That doesn’t mean (at all) a blind copy of FRED, awesome though FRED definitely is.

And if the team that does end up working on this is also allowed to come up with a beta version of the new website, well, that would just be the proverbial cherry on top.

I mean, why not?